Top Secret America

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exposé

Postby slomo » Tue Jul 20, 2010 12:09 pm

stickdog99 wrote:The entire Greenwald piece is must reading, IMHO.

Greenwald's blog/column has become mandatory daily reading for me.
User avatar
slomo
 
Posts: 1781
Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2005 8:42 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exposé

Postby RocketMan » Tue Jul 20, 2010 1:25 pm

slomo wrote:
stickdog99 wrote:The entire Greenwald piece is must reading, IMHO.

Greenwald's blog/column has become mandatory daily reading for me.


Yep, mine too... I wonder how hip he's to parapolitical research as a field. I suppose he couldn't expound on that in any case, lest he lose his niche on the outskirts of mainstream commentary.

He really cuts to the chase and has no patience for platitudes.
-I don't like hoodlums.
-That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.
User avatar
RocketMan
 
Posts: 2812
Joined: Mon Mar 10, 2008 7:02 am
Location: By the rivers dark
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exposé

Postby slomo » Tue Jul 20, 2010 1:59 pm

RocketMan wrote:
slomo wrote:
stickdog99 wrote:The entire Greenwald piece is must reading, IMHO.

Greenwald's blog/column has become mandatory daily reading for me.


Yep, mine too... I wonder how hip he's to parapolitical research as a field. I suppose he couldn't expound on that in any case, lest he lose his niche on the outskirts of mainstream commentary.

He really cuts to the chase and has no patience for platitudes.

The way he writes, explicit mention of parapolitics is unnecessary (and therefore a poor rhetorical strategy from his perspective). In other words, he gets to the points that are essential for a mainstream audience to understand without including any material that could potentially be alienating.
User avatar
slomo
 
Posts: 1781
Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2005 8:42 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exposé

Postby Simulist » Tue Jul 20, 2010 2:05 pm

stickdog99 wrote:The entire Greenwald piece is must reading, IMHO.

Yes, it is.

In it, Greenwald writes this:

Glenn Greenwald wrote:As George Carlin put it several years ago, in an amazingly succinct summary of so many things:

And now, they're coming for your Social Security money - they want your fucking retirement money - they want it back - so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you sooner or later. Because they own this fucking place. It's a Big Club: and you're not in it.


That's really the only relevant question: how much longer will Americans sit by passively and watch as a tiny elite become more bloated, more powerful, greedier, more corrupt and more unaccountable -- as the little economic security, privacy and freedom most citizens possess vanish further still?

Americans will sit passively by and watch, until they've literally lost everything, and the bitter end prompts some of them to rethink a few things.

And why? Why will Americans wait this long? Because this is an addiction we're talking about here — and Americans are addicts! The vast majority of the people in this nation are addicted to the 100 proof intoxicant, "American Pride and Power."

Until Americans hit rock bottom, nothing changes.

(And even then, the prognosis for recovery is iffy at best.)
"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
    — Alan Watts
User avatar
Simulist
 
Posts: 4713
Joined: Thu Dec 31, 2009 10:13 pm
Location: Here, and now.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exposé

Postby slomo » Tue Jul 20, 2010 2:10 pm

Simulist wrote:Americans will sit passively by and watch, until they've literally lost everything, and the bitter end prompts some of them to rethink a few things.

Maybe some of them will rethink, but most of them will conclude that it's the homosexuals and hispanics that are to blame.
User avatar
slomo
 
Posts: 1781
Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2005 8:42 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exposé

Postby Simulist » Tue Jul 20, 2010 2:46 pm

slomo wrote:
Simulist wrote:Americans will sit passively by and watch, until they've literally lost everything, and the bitter end prompts some of them to rethink a few things.

Maybe some of them will rethink, but most of them will conclude that it's the homosexuals and hispanics that are to blame.

Tragically, yes. Sometime after America is irretrievably (and undeniably) in free fall, I fully expect increased persecution of Hispanic immigrants and possibly even full-blown "homo hunts" — violent exercises in scapegoating, far surpassing any of the "witch hunts" of history — because the American people will be looking for "the reason" the Unholy Psychopath so many of them have been groveling to for centuries has finally stopped "blessing America."

And since many Americans can't handle anything but simple answers (and, most often, especially stupid ones), they have already allowed themselves to be pre-programmed to consider gay people as the prime scapegoat in that regard, almost immediately. (Remember Falwell and Robertson after 9/11?)

The United States of America is bankrupt in almost every possible way: morally, intellectually, and (as people are only now just beginning to perceive) financially.

I'm afraid "the day after" the Crash is going to begin the ugliest time of all.
"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
    — Alan Watts
User avatar
Simulist
 
Posts: 4713
Joined: Thu Dec 31, 2009 10:13 pm
Location: Here, and now.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exposé

Postby Nordic » Tue Jul 20, 2010 6:03 pm

I think you guys are still talking about a noisy minority. And they're just bullies. When confronted they will vanish. Look at all these gun-toting "patriots" in the American South, along the gulf, where an ostensibly British company just destroyed their way of life. They sat on their pussies and barely said a WORD about how they'd just seen their livelihoods DESTROYED.

They're useless idiot noisemakers.

Remember even the Klan hid their faces.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
Nordic
 
Posts: 14230
Joined: Fri Nov 10, 2006 3:36 am
Location: California USA
Blog: View Blog (6)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exposé

Postby Sweejak » Tue Jul 20, 2010 7:20 pm

Not WAPO.

It derives from the Eye of God technique, which plays on primitive fears of an all-seeing cosmic Eye of God that sees into your mind. It was used in World War One by morale officers who sent pilots in small aircraft to fly over enemy camps to call out the names of individual soldiers. CIA psywar expert Ed Lansdale, Graham Greene's model for Alden Pyle in The Quiet American, used this technique in the Philippines in the early 1950s. At night a psywar team would creep into town and paint an eye (like the one that appears atop the pyramid in the Great Seal of the United States) on the wall of a house facing a suspected Communist or Communist sympathizer.


The modern manifestation of selective terror is the computerized blacklist – the greatest blackmail scheme ever invented: if you don't do what Bush and his clique want, your name pops up and you're suppressed. Be forewarned, the Bush Regime's blacklists include the INS/State Department's TIPOFF; CAPPS II, which uses credit information and secret databases to assess a person's security risk level each time he or she flies; the "No-Fly" blacklist of peace activists, distributed to airlines by the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration; and local blacklists like the one kept by the Denver police department. You know about these lists. You just don't know about the secret ones, the Bush Regime's enemies list of its most powerful domestic political opponents.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/valentine10.1.html
User avatar
Sweejak
 
Posts: 3250
Joined: Sat Jul 02, 2005 7:40 pm
Location: Border Region 5
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exposé

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Tue Jul 20, 2010 11:39 pm

This 'expose' is the CIA-WPost doing forestalling, a counterpropaganda technique of appearing to reveal but in a safer way than the revealing done by others.

They are trying to sustain their mythic reputation as a 'watch dog against Big Government for the People,' an image problem massaged ever since Deborah Davis outed the WPost as CIA-media central in 1979 in her book, 'Katherine the Great' which also outed editor Ben Bradlee as an Office of Naval Intelligence and CIA veteran.

In 1984 Jim Hougan outed WPost journo/co-editor Bob Woodward as another uber-high-level Naval Intelligence officer, an expose expanded on in 1991 in a book about Watergate called 'Silent Coup' by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin.

For years others have been writing books about this 'outsourcing' of surveillance functions to overlapping-yet-compartmentalized fronts for the police-state.

Like Tim Shorrock-
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/19/t ... hy_it_took
* Tim Shorrock Asks Why It Took the Washington Post So Long to Investigate the US Intelligence System


Like Shane Harris who published a book called 'The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State' in February, 2010 and published articles much earlier, back when the CIA-Hollywood movie was released called 'The Watchmen.'

http://www.amazon.com/Watchers-Rise-Ame ... 1594202451

March 6,2009-
Image

Another decoy of this outsourcing policy is 'The DaVinci Code.'
Yes, Dan Brown is writing psyops fiction for the masses.

The Pentagon tried out an outsourcing-of-intel system called
the Defense Venture Capitalist Initiative...or...DeVenCI.
After a trial period it was made doctrine.

The kiddies (and their parents) got a decoy from CIA-Disney called
'Home on the Range' about some cattle taking the initiative to defend their home by venturing out.

The slang for contractors-feeding-on-the-Fed-like-ticks, 'Beltway Bandits,' was incorporated into the western theme along with hyper-action by an Arnold Schwarzenegger-styled horse character contrasting the fat-and-slow Rosie O'Donnell-voiced cow character to exploit semantic differential value judgements in the young target audience.
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
User avatar
Hugh Manatee Wins
 
Posts: 9869
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2005 6:51 pm
Location: in context
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exposé

Postby redsock » Fri Jul 23, 2010 7:23 pm

In addition to Greenwald, Chris Floyd's Empire Burlesque is also a must read.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/

From July 20:
In the last decade of the 20th century, a nation often hailed (not least by itself) as the "world's greatest democracy" directed a program of savage economic warfare against a broken, defenseless country. This blockade, carried out with an exacting bureaucratic coldness, killed, by very conservative estimate, at least one million innocent people. More than half of these victims were young children.

Dead children. Thousands of dead children. Tens of thousands of dead children, Hundreds of thousands of dead children. Mountains of dead children. Vast pestiferous slagheaps of dead children. This is what the world's greatest democracy created, deliberately, coldly, as a matter of carefully considered national policy.

The blockade was carried out for one reason only: to force out the broken country's recalcitrant leader, who had once been an ally and client of the world's greatest democracy but was no longer considered acquiescent enough to be allowed to govern his strategically placed land and its vast energy resources. The leadership of both of the dominant power factions in the world's greatest democracy agreed that the deliberate murder of innocent people -- more people than were killed in the coterminous genocide in Rwanda -- was an acceptable price to pay for this geopolitical objective. To them, the game -- that is, the augmentation of their already stupendous, world-shadowing wealth and power -- was worth the candle -- that is, the death spasms of a child in the final agonies of gastroenteritis, or cholera, or some other easily preventable affliction.
User avatar
redsock
 
Posts: 204
Joined: Fri Nov 03, 2006 3:28 pm
Location: Ontario, Canada
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exposé

Postby MinM » Thu Aug 05, 2010 2:14 am

viewtopic.php?p=310603#p310603

The parallel universe
By Douglas Valentine
Online Journal Guest Writer

As a result of Dana Priest’s three-part article, Top-Secret America, published in the Washington Post, pundits have been falling all over themselves in their rush to describe the size and implications of the elephant in the living room. Forget that none of these pundits has seen fit to write about the elephant before. More important is the fact that the elephant has dimensions Dana Priest never even touched upon.

Let me tell you a story.

In 1985, I was contacted by Larry, a CIA officer who had had a breakdown and wanted to talk to me. He had served as a deep cover agent overseas for over 15 years at that point. He had been recruited from the Marines in Vietnam, and given a fake life in which his father had been an Australian soldier in World War II, and his mother a Filipino who died in childbirth. The Australian soldier had abandoned the mother before she gave birth. The father had later died in World War II, and Larry, having been brought up in an orphanage, was adopted as an infant by a couple in the United States.

In the legend created by the CIA, Larry’s foster parents told him about his real parents while he was a Marine in Vietnam. Larry took advantage of his proximity to the Philippines to travel there and claim his right to Filipino citizenship. In this way the CIA established an agent in the Philippines, with impeccable credentials. Larry eventually was even elected to public office.

To make a long story short, after Larry’s breakdown, the CIA got him a job as a manager of a Playboy club in Detroit. Later they transferred him to Washington, DC, as manager of the Four Ways restaurant. When I met him there, his Filipino wife and entourage were staffing the facility, along with his CIA hand-holder, who handled finances.

This was the fanciest place I had never been in my life. It was a place where State Department officials, foreign dignitaries and business tycoons enjoyed the finest wines and the most haute cuisine. Each lavishly appointed room had its own dining table and waiter. As I sat in a leather booth in the wood-paneled basement bar with Larry, he explained that each room was bugged by the CIA.

As we were talking, a group of well-dressed younger people in the company of one older man took occupied the booth next to us. The rest of the basement bar was empty. They ordered drinks, but remained silent and alert as Larry explained the ins and outs of his CIA experience to me. At one point, he nodded to the older man at the other table; then he informed me that the young people were junior officer trainees from Langley, who were also listening to his lecture.

Again, to make a very long story short, Larry explained that the CIA manages a parallel society to American society, where deep cover agents like him, as well as retired CIA officers and their agents, are provided with comfortable employment in their retirement years, or when they otherwise need recompense for their service. Many of these agents have no resume that is suitable in the modern professional world. So there is this parallel universe that they are folded into, as managers of the local Ford dealership, or Chinese restaurant, or hotel, or in hundreds and thousands of other jobs.

Think of it as a sort a witness protection program. Since 1985 it has grown substantially. It is, of course, another facet of Top-Secret America, but the ex-spooks in this dimension are not your average every day wingnut ideologue informant or strong-arm man. They know how to burn down buildings, which is what the CIA does.

As John Lennon said, “Imagine.”


Doug Valentine is the author of “The Phoenix Program” and his latest book is “The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped The DEA.” Please visit his website at http://www.members.authorsguild.net/valentine/bio.htm.

Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
Email Online Journal Editor
Earth-704509
User avatar
MinM
 
Posts: 3286
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2008 2:16 pm
Location: Mont Saint-Michel
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exp

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Dec 12, 2010 2:22 am

.

New relevance with the Wikileaks affair.

This is the level above the cables we're getting to read.

This is the level also present, covertly, in the cables. It's asked, where's the CIA in the cables so far? Probably everywhere. The State Department is a CIA colony.

jingofever, you ought to ask to retitle this thread "Top Secret America" so it gets more readers and posts.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exp

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Dec 12, 2010 12:18 pm

Frontline special is coming next month: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... etamerica/
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exp

Postby Simulist » Sun Dec 12, 2010 4:29 pm

Thanks to Jack for resurrecting this thread, and to MinM for providing this fascinating quote, which I'd missed the first time around:
Again, to make a very long story short, Larry explained that the CIA manages a parallel society to American society, where deep cover agents like him, as well as retired CIA officers and their agents, are provided with comfortable employment in their retirement years, or when they otherwise need recompense for their service. Many of these agents have no resume that is suitable in the modern professional world. So there is this parallel universe that they are folded into, as managers of the local Ford dealership, or Chinese restaurant, or hotel, or in hundreds and thousands of other jobs.

Think of it as a sort a witness protection program. Since 1985 it has grown substantially. It is, of course, another facet of Top-Secret America, but the ex-spooks in this dimension are not your average every day wingnut ideologue informant or strong-arm man. They know how to burn down buildings, which is what the CIA does.

As John Lennon said, “Imagine.”

Oh, I'm imagining... (I'd like to think I'm imagining a bit too much right now, but I'm really not so sure.)

Back in the mid 1980s, I remember reading about the old Soviet Union and how the KGB and its informants were rather ubiquitous in that society. If this is also true for the modern-day United States — and the quote from above seems to suggest that it might be — then who really knows some of the people each of us assumes we "know"? Some people ranging from your local grocer to the parish priest could have objectives as informants few of us dared suspect, lest we think of ourselves as paranoids.

In other words, this might be notably more common than most people may realize, or even suspect.
"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
    — Alan Watts
User avatar
Simulist
 
Posts: 4713
Joined: Thu Dec 31, 2009 10:13 pm
Location: Here, and now.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: DC's spy establishment in panic over Washington Post exp

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Dec 15, 2010 7:14 pm

Simulist wrote:Back in the mid 1980s, I remember reading about the old Soviet Union and how the KGB and its informants were rather ubiquitous in that society. If this is also true for the modern-day United States — and the quote from above seems to suggest that it might be — then who really knows some of the people each of us assumes we "know"? Some people ranging from your local grocer to the parish priest could have objectives as informants few of us dared suspect, lest we think of ourselves as paranoids.

In other words, this might be notably more common than most people may realize, or even suspect.


The comparison you suggest may be illuminating, including for the differences.

In the GDR, the Stasi employed about 100,000 people at any given time (so figure at least that many formers, many of whom remained connected as they drew a standard pension) and ran a network of 175,000 informants so far identified. This is in a country of 16 million people. It was centralized and it was obvious. For all the stories like that of the woman who discovered her husband was actually her spy of a dozen years standing, for the most part people knew or could guess when they were dealing with their own watchers, and at any rate knew they were being watched.

The Stasi and the state had a comparatively clear internal hierarchy and chain of command and a clear primary function of maintaining the power of a centralized one-party state over a population who, while generally conformist during most periods of East German history, as a whole would have preferred to see that state disappear; as it did, in the end. Furthermore, the Stasi was not home to a habitat for parapolitics and private or rogue initiative nearly one-tenth as rich as that provided by the giant riot of US alphabet agencies, black budget programs, front companies and, of course, the private contractors who now get most of the US intel budget money. (The latter can largely do whatever business in addition that they please, and have more options for doing that business in collaboration with allied agencies and contractors as well as money launderers and arms and drug dealers and militias and proxy armies across a worldwide empire.)

The Stasi's per-capita GDP, so to speak, was necessarily lower than they would have liked, and there were fewer opportunities for profit and fewer actors worldwide clamoring to do business with them. The overseers of the Stasi could look into its compartments with relative ease, when they desired, and thus had an easier time remaining in control of it. For them, the Stasi was comparably transparent! The Stasi kept well-organized, centralized and comprehensive records, on paper; notwithstanding a great deal of re-writing and fakery that entered from the operative level. The state and its officials did not need to develop the same sophistication of establishing cover stories for plausible deniability, and thus did not flood the world with comparably effective disinformation. It was a small world run by one big gorilla. They told their lies, nobody believed them, and it didn't matter; they got their way.

The constitutional arrangements were generally known to be fake and thus East Germany was a dictatorship that called itself a democracy, but functionally much less of a dual state.

APPROACHING THE DUAL STATE OF THE WEST

Ola Tunander

In a 1955 study of the United States State Department, Hans Morgenthau discussed the existence of a US ‘dual state’. According to Morgenthau, the US state includes both a ‘regular state hierarchy’ that acts according to the rule of law and a more or less hidden ‘security hierarchy’—which I will refer to here as the ‘security state’ (also known in some countries as the ‘deep state’) —that not only acts in parallel to the former but also monitors and exerts control over it. In Morgenthau’s view, this security aspect of the state—the ‘security state’—is able to ‘exert an effective veto over the decisions’ of the regular state governed by the rule of law. While the ‘democratic state’ offers legitimacy to security politics, the ‘security state’ intervenes where necessary, by limiting the range of democratic politics. While the ‘democratic state’ deals with political alternatives, the ‘security state’ enters the scene when ‘no alternative exists’, when particular activities are ‘securitised’ —in the event of an ‘emergency’. In fact, the security state is the very apparatus that defines when and whether a ‘state of emergency’ will emerge. This aspect of the state is what Carl Schmitt, in his 1922 work Political Theology, referred to as the ‘sovereign’.

Logically speaking, one might argue that Morgenthau’s ‘dual state’ is derived from the same duality as that described in Ernst Fraenkel’s conception of the ‘dual state’, which Fraenkel described as typifying the Nazi regime of Hitler’s Germany. In the Nazi case, though, this duality was overt, combining the ‘regular’ legal state with a parallel ‘prerogative state’, an autocratic paramilitary emergency state or Machtstaat that operated outside or ‘above’ the legal system, with its philosophical foundation in the Schmittian ‘sovereign’. Fraenkel refers to Emil Lederer, who argues that this Machtstaat (‘power state’, as distinct from the Rechtstaat) has its historical origins in the European aristocratic elite, which still played an important role within European society after the triumph of democracy. This elite acted behind the scene in the 1920s, but considered it necessary to intervene in support of the Nazi Party in the 1930s to prevent a possible socialist takeover. However, this autocratic Machtstaat—the Nazi SS-state—was arbitrary, because of its individualised command. In his analysis, Morgenthau draws a parallel between Nazi Germany and the US dual state. Indeed, in his view, the autocratic ‘security state’ may be less visible and less arbitrary in democratic societies such as the US, but it is no less important. Morgenthau argues that the power of making decisions remains with the authorities charged by law with making them, while, as a matter of fact, by virtue of their power over life and death, the agents of the secret police… [and what I would call the security state: author] at the very least exert an effective veto over [these] decisions.

Much more here:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21495&start=675


The US security state is much more complex, rich and labyrinthine, with many more compartments that do not know what's happening in the other boxes, many more storehouses of protected information, many more primary actors in the mix pursuing independent agendas in competition, and less oversight or even possibility of oversight, not just from Congress but from any authority at the top. The US security state is not dedicated to a true primary function as a whole, despite its manufacture of hundreds of threats, but above all to its own self-perpetuation and growth. Otherwise its blind tentacles pursue about 14,000 different interests in 200 countries worldwide (just to make up a number).

From the Washington Post series:

"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not just for the CIA, for the secretary of defense - is a challenge," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration.

"I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."


Here the Washington Post shows its limits in failing to ask a rather elementary question: Who devised the slide-show that was too fast and long and overwhelming for the "Super-User" to follow? Obviously, someone did. The Super-User, presumably the holder of a high-ranking office as appointed by the elected government of the United States, doesn't have the authority to take notes at his briefing, but some team, however it may itself be compartmentalized or cleared, prepared this enormous briefing and is privy to the information. Who is that? Who is the "Slide-Maker"?

(I have one possible answer and you won't be surprised to know it's sociological and based on the concept of caste and the organic development of bureaucracies that outlive all users, Super and otherwise. There is no One Driver of the Car. It's more like a herd that functions by the behavioral rules its species evolved over time, rules that the herd leader does not determine and is not necessarily more conscious of than the others.)

Why can't the Super-User, whose position in the official hierarchy legally is probably superior to the Slide-Maker's, command that, yes, he will take notes and go at his own speed? Who made the rules of this briefing, and who can change them? On what understanding of authority was it doubtless the case that the Super-User, before being allowed to take office, was subjected to a background vetting process by other members of the Slide-Maker caste, but probably doesn't get to vet them in return? Who wrote the vetting rules, and when?

This is the dual state in action, even within the top offices of the Pentagon. The dividing line between formal state and deep state is everywhere within the state and its industrial complexes, and can be found running through the people themselves.

But to get back to your question, Simulist, damn it must be a lot of spooks and former spooks now occupying a host of roles in our society, and enjoying benefits of their spook connections, and/or continuing to pursue spook agendas under private cover, and the most interesting questions are probably not about grocers or parish priests but Senators and news anchors and corporate chiefs and hedge fund managers and think-tank professors and gurus and popes. Currently 865,000 holders of Top Secret clearances, two-thirds of them spread among a couple of thousand private contractors, a couple of million graduates, a labyrinth of parapolitics, all this only begins to indicate the size of the "dark matter." And we've not even begun to consider the local analogues, FBI and state and municipal police and their fifth-generation Red Squads and informants and contractors and barnacles.

Very broadly speaking it all lives from one ideology, however. On this scale very little of it can be animated from within or justified to the outside without the "national" in national security. It needs believers.

.

jingofever! An idea. This was a fine beginning, but what say you petition the RIPTB to change the title of this thread to "Top Secret America," so that newbies know what it's about (now that the WP story is half a year old) and we can consolidate discussion on that subject here?

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 41 guests